Singing from Manuscripts? Fifteenth-Century, English, Secular Songs with Music and their Reading Practices

Authors

  • Timothy Glover University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords:

Fifteenth century, Reading Practices, History of the Book, Music, Song and Literature

Abstract

This essay explores the reading practices associated with fifteenth-century manuscripts containing English, secular songs with music, of which only two such manuscripts survive. It addresses the claim that the primary mode of reading was one in which readers sang directly from the manuscripts themselves in performance. This essay challenges this claim by exploring the ways in which the manuscripts themselves suggest alternative models of reading and performance. After dissecting previous critical stances on this subject, this essay begins by discussing the construction of the two manuscripts, examining how the varying contexts and purposes which can be inferred suggest very different uses intended for each manuscript, and hence different reading practices. The second section discusses performance contexts in more depth, analysing the ways in which the physical page both facilitates and complicates a performance directly from the manuscript. In particular I explore the ways in which omissions and apparent deficiencies in the music challenge the view that they were intended to be performed from like modern music. In doing so, I attempt to exonerate scribes from the blame laid on them by some music historians, who see these absences as failures rather than as occurring within the context of a more flexible relationship between page and performance than has been previously thought. By exploring the extent to which the manuscripts in fact point to various possibilities of reading, I argue that both manuscripts suggest that they could have been used for a range of functions, including as a book of songs for rehearsal, a memory-aid in performance, or an archival repository of songs. Overall I argue that these books suggest multiple possible modes of reading and performance in relation to the physical page, and hence that the reading practices of fifteenth-century musical manuscripts were more diverse than has previously been suggested.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Manuscripts

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Arch. Selden B. 26, part I. ff. 3-33v. Manuscript.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 191, part IV. ff. 191-211v. Manuscript.

Facsimiles

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Arch. Selden B. 26. Early Manuscripts at Oxford University: Digital facsimiles of complete manuscripts, scanned directly from the originals. http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=bodleian&manuscript=msarchseldenb26. Accessed 24 March 2016. Online database.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 191. Digital Archive of Medieval Music. http://www.diamm.ac.uk/jsp/Descriptions?op=SOURCE&sourceKey=488. Accessed 24 March 2016. Online database.

Portugal, Braga, Arquivo da Sé MS. 34. Portuguese Early Music Database. http://pemdatabase.eu/source/2350. Accessed 24 March 2016. Online database.

Secondary Works

Bell, Nicholas. Music in Medieval Manuscripts. London: The British Library, 2001. Print.

Bent, Margaret. ‘Early Music Editing, Forty Years On: Principles, Techniques, and Future Directions’. Early Music Editing: Principles, Historiography, Future Directions. Ed. Theodor Dumitrescu, Karl Kügle, and Marnix van Berchum. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 241-271. Print.

---. ‘Polyphonic sources, ca. 1400-1450’. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 617-640. Print.

Binkley, Thomas. ‘The work is not the performance’. Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music. Ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 36-43. Print.

Boffey, Julia and A.S.G. Edwards. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. Print.

Busse Berger, Anna Maria. ‘How Did Oswald von Wolkenstein Make his Contrafacta?’. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 164-182. Print.

---. Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.

Busse Berger, Anna Maria and Jesse Rodin. Eds. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print.

Caldwell, John. Editing Early Music. 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print.

Canguilhem, Philippe. ‘Improvisation as Concept and Musical Practice in the Fifteenth Century’. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 149-163. Print.

Cantus Index: Online Catalogue for Chant and Office Music. http://cantusindex.org. Accessed 22 March 2016. Online database.

Curran, Sean. ‘Writing, Performance, and Devotion in the Thirteenth-century Motet: The “La Clayette” Manuscript’. Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. Ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 193-220. Print.

Deeming, Helen. ‘Preserving and Recycling: Functional Multiplicity and Shifting Priorities in the Compilation and Continued Use of London, British Library, Egerton 274’. Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. Ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 141-162. Print.

Deeming, Helen and Elizabeth Leach. ‘Songs, Scattered and Gathered’. Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. Ed. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 271-285. Print.

Derolez, Albert. ‘The Codicology of Late Medieval Music Manuscripts: Some Preliminary Observations’. The Calligraphy of Medieval Music. Ed. John Haines. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. 23-35. Print.

Fallows, David. ‘English Song Repertories of the Mid-Fifteenth Century’. Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 103 (1976-77): 61-79. Print.

---. ‘The most popular songs of the fifteenth century’. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 787-801. Print.

---. Secular Polyphony 1380-1480. London: Stainer and Bell. 2014. Print.

Greene, Richard Leighton. The Early English Carols. 2nd rev. ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Print.

Hamm, Charles. ‘Manuscript Structure in the Dufay Era’. Acta Musicologica 34 (1962): 166-84. Print.

Harrán, Don. Word-Tone Relations in Musical Thought. Newhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag, 1986. Print.

King, Jonathan. ‘Texting Practices in Manuscript Sources of Early Fifteenth-Century Polyphony’. Journal of the Royal Music Association 124.1 (1999): 1-24. Print.

Kwakkel, Eric. ‘A New Type of Book for a New Type of Reader: the Emergence of Paper in Vernacular Book Production’. Library. 7th ser., 4 (2003): 219-48. Print.

Leach, Elizabeth. ‘An Introduction to the Basics of Fourteenth-century French Music Notation’. 2011. http://diamm.nsms.ox.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=2. Accessed 09 March 2016. Webpage.

Livesey, Steven J., and Richard H. Rouse. ‘Nimrod the Astronomer’. Traditio 37 (1981): 203-266. Print.

Mooney, Linne R.. Ed. The Kalendarium of John Somer. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998. Print.

Norwood, Patricia. ‘Performance Manuscripts of the Thirteenth-Century?’. College Music Symposium 26 (1986): 92-6. Print.

Padelford, F.M.. ‘English Songs in Manuscript Selden B. 26.’. Anglia 36 (1912): 79-115. Print.

Pietschmann, Klaus. ‘Musical Institutions in the Fifteenth Century and their Political Contexts’. Trans. James Steichen. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 403-426. Print.

Schmidt-Beste, Thomas. ‘Polyphonic Sources, ca. 1450-1500’. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music. Ed. Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 641-662. Print.

Stainer, Sir John. Ed. Early Bodleian Music: Sacred & Secular Songs, together with the other MS. compositions in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ranging from about A.D. 1185 to about A.D. 1505. With an introduction by E. W. B. Nicholson and musical transcriptions by J. F. R. Stainer and C. Stainer. 2 vols. London: Novello and Company, 1901. Print.

Stevens, John. Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Print.

Strohm, Reinhard. ‘Unwritten and written music’. Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music. Ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 228-233. Print.

Downloads

Published

2017-01-31

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Singing from Manuscripts? Fifteenth-Century, English, Secular Songs with Music and their Reading Practices. (2017). Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English, 33. https://postgradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/187